Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (71 page)

Matters did not improve when Mercedes returned to school. Unlike Mrs. Cormier, Mrs. Hutchins, Mercedes’s new fifth-grade teacher, employed a traditional classroom approach. Mercedes bucked against Mrs. Hutchins’s authority. Mrs. Hutchins’s attempts to manage Mercedes resembled Coco’s: she tried reason and bribery and punishment and raising her voice, but, eventually, she gave in. It was easier to let Mercedes sleep than to battle, as it had been easier, that winter, to let Mercedes wear her puff coat in the hall. Sometimes Mrs. Hutchins shipped Mercedes off to the nurse’s office, where Mercedes napped some more. Three months into the academic year, her school instituted what they called “Mercedes’s Behavioral Plan,” which formalized the consequences for Mercedes’s infractions—not opening her book, not saluting the flag, banging computer keys. Unheeded verbal warnings resulted in the appearance of a hall monitor, who escorted Mercedes to the guidance counselor’s office, where she also slept. Detention made up for whatever class time got lost between the warning and its resolution. Despite the fact that the plan ignored Mercedes’s physical exhaustion, it worked briefly, just as every other official response had. Except for Ramapo Anchorage Camp, Mercedes had never had access to exceptional programs, but even the mediocre ones had always done some good. For a while, Mercedes responded well to a timeout arrangement that involved reading to younger kids. To make a lasting difference, though, the help itself had to last.

Mrs. Hutchins did notice Mercedes’s wariness about taking chances. The child demanded to know answers before she tried to find them. She refused to do anything in front of the class. If she had a good day and Mrs.
Hutchins invited her to move her desk from the back of the room into a regular row, Mercedes declined. She felt safer on the sidelines, in the ghetto of her isolated desk. Mrs. Hutchins said, “It was as though she didn’t trust herself.”

Serena moved in with Jessica in the fall of 2000 and she started ninth grade all over again. Lourdes and Emilio pushed on to Robert’s, in Brooklyn; Domingo, Lourdes’s ex, moved them with his truck. Almost immediately, Serena and Jessica began having arguments. Serena felt Jessica spent too much time with Máximo; Jessica felt Serena spent too much time with her friends. Jessica hounded Serena about cleaning; Serena called Jessica a “clean freak.” Serena spent weekends with Elaine in Yonkers, which alternately relieved and wounded Jessica; sometimes Serena went to Lourdes’s. If Máximo or Jessica gave Serena money, she took the bus to Troy.

Milagros worked full-time and studied nursing four nights a week. During one trip up, Serena passed by her aunt’s. Coco had moved again. She was living in a dilapidated, picture-cluttered apartment in a tenement a few blocks from her old place, but the blocks were long on River Street.

Serena held La-Monté while Coco brushed Mercedes’s hair. Lately, Mercedes had become more interested in her looks, and Coco had been waking up early each morning to style her hair for school. Serena chattered on about a boyfriend. He worked at a store near Jessica’s and had welcomed Serena into his group of friends. The inclusion eased her first nervous days of a new school. “He bought me sneakers,” Serena said. He’d even given her money to pass along to her sisters, although they’d never met.

“Mami, it’s not all about buying,” Coco said. “Take all he gives. But it’s not all about buying, cuz they usually do that till you give in. Once you give in—not all men, I can’t say all men—but once you end up giving in, then you’ll see the change.” As Coco braided, she spoke frankly with her niece about sex and Frankie and the value of independence. “Make sure that he respect,” Coco said to Serena, but as much for her daughter’s ears.

Then, just as Serena was readying to leave, Mercedes called out to her mother from the kitchen. She sounded frightened.

“What, Mercy?” Coco said. Mercedes’s face was wet with tears. “What happened?” Coco asked.

It took a while for Mercedes to calm down enough to speak. She told her mother that during the summer visit to Grandma Foxy’s, Foxy’s boyfriend, Hernan, had done something nasty to her.

It was impossible for Coco to find out exactly what had happened: Mercedes said that Hernan had made comments as she came out of the shower—that he’d suggested she remove her towel and that, in turn, he would expose himself to her. Hernan said that he’d discovered Mercedes smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, and that in the ensuing argument about who was old enough to do what, Mercedes had said that she was already having sex. Coco believed her daughter. She took her to the doctor, who said she was fine, and gave the doctor Hernan’s address and phone number, so that he could be questioned by the authorities.

When Coco first called Foxy and told her what Mercedes had said, both mother and daughter cried and cried. Foxy told Coco that she had been repeatedly sexually abused as a child, and then Coco confessed that she had been molested several times by a cousin, when she was nine. Foxy was shocked that Coco had never told her. Foxy also promised to confront her boyfriend the following day, when he was sober.

An official inquiry was begun in the ensuing weeks: Mercedes and her sisters were individually questioned at school, and an investigator went to Hernan’s and interviewed him, but did not pursue the matter.

Coco had never held her mother responsible for what had happened to her when she was a little girl. But that fall, when she realized that Foxy wasn’t going to leave Hernan—even though Coco had made it clear Foxy was welcome in Troy—something in Coco’s feelings for her mother changed. Coco’s years of anger and frustration with Foxy had been based on the belief that Foxy could fix her life if she really wanted to—if not for herself, at least for her grandkids. Now Coco understood that her mother didn’t have the strength. Finally, Coco saw that her home was no longer in the Bronx. Within weeks, she was called back to Garden Way, and this time, she would remain there for almost a year.

The following spring, Coco finally got her tubes tied. Then her grandmother passed away after almost a year in the hospital. For the first time, Coco debated whether she should make the journey home for an important family occasion. The practical dilemma—whether the car she had bought with her tax refund would get them to the wake—got tangled with the eternal one: choosing what was best for her and the children, or trying to help her family. She didn’t have enough money to get there and contribute to the collection for her grandmother’s funeral costs, but then Frankie surprised her. Unasked, he filled the tank with gas and handed her $200. Coco suspected he wanted her away for some reason, but she didn’t interrogate him.

The girls had already gone to the corner store to buy snacks for the drive when Coco surprised herself. The trip to the Bronx was simply not worth what it would cost her: the girls would miss school, and she’d miss work. “My grandmother’s dead, God forgive me, but after this I go on. My life goes on living,” Coco said. She decided to take her family to dinner at King Buffet instead, and she invited the two white girls who lived in the apartment downstairs to come along.

The two sisters, eight and ten, lived with their religious father. Coco pitied the girls, who were wispy and pale; their mother lived hours away. “I know they all into the church, and not cursing, but you have to live a little,” Coco said. The group packed into the clunky car and it got them there, and they had a beautiful time.

It pleased Coco to see her children comfortable in restaurants. She still remembered the awkwardness she’d felt the time when she’d eaten out with Jessica and a drug dealer Jessica had been dating while Boy George was in jail; Coco had felt so self-conscious that she hadn’t been able to fully enjoy the meal. But at King Buffet, Mercedes and Nautica confidently ate plate after plate of vegetables and salad. Nikki bided her time until Coco freed her to join the lengthy line of children at the soft-ice-cream machine. Pearl smothered mashed potatoes with melted cheese sauce. La-Monté ate pretty much everything. He was an easy baby, generous and sweet.

He offered food to an elderly lady seated behind him; she received the mushy gift. Serenity fell upon the table. Nautica didn’t cause a ruckus. The two sad white sisters got happier. Pearl didn’t vomit up her meal. Even Mercedes seemed contented. Life was a feast. A man approached Coco. He said, “What, you got these children on tranquilizers?”

“Thank you,” Coco said, aglow with pride. She whispered in Nautica’s ear, “Naughty, see? When you do right, and somebody compliments you, how good that feel?”

The old lady La-Monté had befriended finished her dinner and gave him a kiss good-bye. A busboy cleared the table, and a new couple soon sat down. La-Monté welcomed them wholeheartedly. The new lady didn’t speak English. La-Monté gurgled a few words of Spanish and held out a gob of chicken. The lady remained uncharmed. Coco covered her mouth but didn’t suppress her laughter. She pressed her face close to La-Monté’s food-smeared one and planted a loud kiss on his fat cheek. “Go, La-Monté, that’s my son,” she said, swiping his mouth with a napkin quickly before he balked. Some people were nice and others simply weren’t. La-Monté was a friendly baby, hopeful. There was no shame in that.

M
ercedes had been doing better in school since her trailer visit with Cesar and Giselle in December, but in April, her teacher said, “she went back to being the old Mercedes again.” Shortly afterward, she launched a bold plan for attention, which landed like a dud. According to Iris, who worked at Mercedes’s school as an aide, one Friday, during school, Mercedes told the parent liaison, Ms. Sanford, that she’d had sex with a boy. Ms. Sanford conferred with Mrs. Cormier, Mercedes’s favorite teacher from fourth grade; Mrs. Cormier suggested that the parent liaison ask Mercedes’s permission to share the news with the principal, and school authorities say Mercedes agreed. In fact, she seemed eager for Miss Scutari to hear: she trailed Ms. Sanford to the principal’s office and hovered outside the door.

Glass windows lined the school office, and Miss Scutari saw Mercedes watching her; intentionally, she showed no reaction to the news and returned to her paperwork. Mercedes lingered for well over an hour, until Miss Scutari finally stepped into the hall.

Mercedes blurted, “Did Ms. Sanford tell you something?”

“No,” Miss Scutari said. She later said she didn’t want to give Mercedes the reaction she seemed to want. In the meantime, the news was spreading up and down the hallway. Iris sensed something amiss that afternoon when she reported to work. She asked Ms. Sanford, who briefed her, then Iris called Coco, and Coco, furious, immediately called the principal. How could the school phone her if Mercedes refused to open a book but not call her about something this serious? Coco confronted Mercedes, who denied saying anything; the principal apologized. The question of whether or not Mercedes had, in fact, had sex, or why she had spoken to three adults about it, somehow got lost.

A few days later, Mercedes made her second spectacular bid for attention: she walked out of detention and then out of the school altogether. She strode down the steep hill toward River Street, past the bleak block where Iris and her family now lived. She cut across the pounded turf of a small park where boys sometimes sold crack from a wobbly swing set, past the field where she played softball and the picnic area where her Girl Scout troop sometimes met. The block was one of the
bases of Troy’s growing gang activity: lots of the boys on the block wore bandannas; a few were Frankie’s customers. Mercedes passed La Placita Market, Troy’s first Spanish store, and ten minutes later, she was home. The school suspended Mercedes for five days.